Foreign
Connections…
Raoul
Coutard, Cinematographer (France)
(Image
by Lalit Tiwari, Motion Picture Photography
1997)
 When
I came to Pune, I was very surprised by the
amenities of this Institute. There was everything
one needed to learn and teachers who appeared
to me to be very competent. My presence was
to be only an opening to an understanding of
a certain European cinema.
One
may wonder why we need a school for cinema and
television. Of course, the most important requirement
is talent. One cannot learn to have talent in
a school but one can discover it. In a military
school we create officers: we teach them logistics,
to command, to manage; we habituate them to
the noise of battlefields, they earn their stripes
and they become commanders. They have gold stripes
on their shoulders but we have not taught them
to be commanders.
Being
a leader means leading without the authority
of stripes, to lead by charisma. But if these
commanders had not been trained at the military
academy, they would never have been able to
reveal their leadership and strategic qualities.
For
cinema, and by this I mean also analog and digital
television, there is an entire environment that
must be studied. Tools and technologies must
be mastered to create emotion. Konrad Lorenz
said that everything we live for was born of
emotion. This impalpable, unquantifiable emotion
can only be born of talent but talent does not
not reveal itself unless it is in contact with
others. In this same progression, in the manipulation
of this complexity, not just an industry but
also an art, we manipulate images, sounds, actors,
screenplay writers, decorators, hairdressers
and make up artists and workers (without whom
we are nothing) in the necessity of working
together to succeed.
Continue
to try and create beauty. To appear erudite,
let me once again quote de la fontaine:
“Beauty.
Thankfully this word exists; else we would have
said it is magic.”
Helma
Sanders-Brahms, Filmmaker (Germany)
 The
tree of wisdom like any other tree is growing
or dying. It brings forth its leaves, its blossoms
and its fruit. The leaves, the blossoms and
the fruit of the human beings are what they
create. Today’s harvest is what centuries
of human culture have left us epics, paintings,
novels, opera, film. Economists are on the verge
of killing our tree of wisdom and destroying
what the endless line of generations before
us has generously given us. Their idea of economy
makes us believe that imagination and culture
can be created by technical development. Year
after year new systems of communications and
new technologies are introduced that destroy
each other and a lot of money is spent for this
absurdity which of course has to be saved somewhere
else – but where? – on the side
of the living beings and the development of
their creativity and sensibility and knowledge.
Our world is so busy to keep up with all these
new communication gadgets that it forgets to
ask whether this way of spending and saving
makes sense.
But
even the most wonderful tools of communication
are not more than a pencil and a piece of paper
for the writer or a brush and a canvas for the
painter – what the future will value is
the contents of what was written or painted.
And even in the wonderful world of the New Media
the future will value the content of the films
that are made today and tomorrow and not the
instruments with which they were shot and edited.
It will need the constant growth of the wisdom
tree and not the cutting of the roots that nourish
it.
Film
is the most complex of human arts; it is the
result of thousands of years of human culture.
It includes all the other arts, drama, music,
painting; it has its economic, its social and
its technical side; it is the language of our
planet, which is universally spoken; and it
has a history of more then hundred years which
must not be ignored. Thus the teaching of film
is the most complex and demanding task for the
student as well as for the professor and the
investment in it is the best guarantee for the
future of any country and this so much more
for India as it started in the last few years
to conquer the hearts and minds of the world’s
spectators with its wonderful movies.
These articles have been
taken from the ‘wisTreefest Bulletins’
that were published daily during the Wisdom
Tree Film Festival, Pune 2003.
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